Any Way You Cut It, This Film Simply A Slasher Flick At Heart

Movies - REVIEW - `The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi'

August 27, 2004|By Roger Moore, Sentinel Movie Critic

The "Blind Swordsman," a k a "the Japanese Zorro," slashes and splashes his bloody way back onto the screen in The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi. Long a favorite series of Japanese films, this is something like the 25th version of this tale, but the first in 10 years and the first filmed to the Takeshi Kitano beat.

Kitano, who goes by the stage name "Beat," plays around with this bloody myth of the quiet, sightless warrior who wanders from town to town, wiping out "bandits" and killing off crime bosses in Japan's lawless 19th century.

Kitano mimics the rhythm of workers in the fields, or men hammering a house together, with the musical score. He finishes with a show of footwork that's closer to Riverdance than anything Japanese.

And for the many, many fights in this slasher pic, Kitano creatively sprays the screen with dollops of digital blood. The real stuff was, of course, out of the question. And stage blood doesn't splatter quite so, um, vividly.

Kitano, of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and Johnny Mnemonic, stars as the white-haired Zatoichi, a blind masseuse who is really a samurai without portfolio who uses his other senses to foil the almost constant attacks on his person.

He keeps his eyes closed and his head cocked to one side, as if crippled by a lifetime of listening for every clue that danger may be near. It always is.

Zatoichi finds himself drawn into a small town where rival gangs of ronin -- rogue samurai -- terrorize each other and shake down the inhabitants. He hangs with Aunt O-Ume and her nephew, Shinkichi (the comic "Guadalcanal" Taka), and, more interestingly, meets two geishas on a murderous mission of revenge.

And he runs afoul of the gangs. One has just hired a super-ronin, played by Tadanobu Asano. You just know he and Zatoichi are headed for a throw-down.

Like Zhang Yimou, the great Chinese director who started dabbling in martial arts films with Hero, Kitano is a filmmaker more at home in other genres, especially yakuza mobster pictures. Comparing Hero to Zatoichi is like comparing poetry to lurid, slapdash crime novel prose. Limbs are lopped off, flesh is sliced and eyes are gouged. And those, as Blind Swordsman fan Quentin Tarantino might say, are the "cool" parts.

The sword fights are so sudden, so brief and so bloody that they only point out their brevity and the dullness in between the martial moments. Takeshi's little touches of grace -- that rhythmic soundtrack, for instance -- are few.

This isn't arty violence, just violence, and pretty pedestrian for a samurai picture.